Hi {{first_name}} ,

I did a live Q&A a while back that ran over an hour. A lot of questions came in about working dogs specifically, Malinois, German Shepherds, Dutch Shepherds, Rottweilers, cattle dogs.

A few themes came up repeatedly that I want to address here. Because I see people making these mistakes constantly, not just with working dogs but with any dog that has real drive.

In This Issue

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Here is something people don't talk about enough.

If you let a dog with working drives play too much with other dogs, play with stuffed toys, roam the yard off-leash, do whatever it wants whenever it wants, you are diluting the drive you are going to need when it matters.

A dog playing freely with other dogs loses their desire to work for you. The interaction becomes the reward. You stop being interesting.

If a dog spends all day playing with stuffed animals and then you want that dog to retrieve and hold a duck, it is not going to happen. The drive has been thinned out. The dog has been satisfying that need on their own terms, not yours.

This does not mean you cannot have a working dog as a pet or keep it in the house. My dogs live in the house. But there is a difference between a dog that has a life and a dog that has no structure.

The drive stays sharp when you control the outlet. When you control the outlet, you become the most interesting thing in the dog's life. That is when you have a dog you can actually work with.

I said this on the live and I mean it.

There are three things a dog must do under any conditions. I do not care about anything else until these three are solid.

Come when called. Stay when told. Leave it when told.

Come is life or death. Stay is life or death. Leave it is life or death. Everything else is training. These three are non-negotiable.

I had someone on the live ask about their Irish Water Spaniel who would not miss a beat chasing a rabbit when called. My answer was direct: you are not building a strong recall with distractions because you have not built the recall without distractions first. Put the dog on a flexi lead, let him go after the rabbit, correct him back to you. Demand the compliance. Then work from there.

You are not doing your dog any favors by not demanding absolute compliance on these three things.

This is the piece I push back on hardest when people think corrections are unkind.

You are never being fair to your dog if you allow it to not obey you.

I know that sounds backwards. People think allowing freedom is kindness. But think about what you are actually doing. If a dog learns that "sit" sometimes means sit and sometimes means optional, the command means nothing. And a command that means nothing is useless when it actually matters.

There is a Taoist idea I come back to on this. Know the big things in the little things, and the little things in the big things. What that means in training: if your dog will not hold a down stay in your living room with zero distractions, that dog is not holding anything on a real street with real stimulation.

Build the little things right and the big things follow. Let the little things slide and the big things fall apart when you need them most.

One more thing on this: a correction is only a correction if the dog knows right from wrong. You do not correct confusion. You correct defiance. If the dog does not understand the command yet, you are not correcting. You are punishing. There is a difference and it matters.

Goofy was raised on a farm. Weaned there. He did not get much exposure to traffic early in his life.

When I first had him near busy roads he was concerned. Not reactive, just unsettled.

What I did: I started taking him down to PCH  (Pacific Coast Highway) and I fed him his meals there. Right on the side of the road with traffic going by.

If he was too concerned about the cars to eat, I brought him back inside. No meals until we went back to PCH. Three hours later, back we went.

Dogs learn through the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of discomfort. If the food is at PCH and the food is not available anywhere else, eventually you eat at PCH. And every time you eat at PCH, the traffic does not hurt you.

He is bulletproof with traffic now. That is it. That is the whole method.

Robert

P.S. Yellow toys. If your dog has no interest in toys and you're trying to build drive, try yellow first. Dogs see yellow differently than other colors. I have seen it make a difference more times than I can count. Start there before you write the dog off as having no toy drive.

1. Building Drive in Dog Training

Building drive is one of the most important things we do. Dogs must want to work and enjoy the work if we want them to perform. My YouTube channel has the full drive building protocol I use. Link below.

Here: [BUILDING DRIVE VIDEO]

2. The Shelter Dog Training Course

The compliance framework I talked about today, the three non-negotiables, the difference between correction and punishment, how to build obedience that holds under real pressure, this is the backbone of the Shelter Dog Training Course. I built it around the hardest training situations that exist: dogs with unknown histories, dogs that have been failed by previous training, dogs that other people have given up on. If you want the full system, it is at the link below.

[LINK TO SHELTER DOG TRAINING COURSE]

3. Membership and community support

If you want to go deeper on any of this, everything is inside my membership. 250-plus lessons, over 85 hours of instruction, organized so you can find exactly what you need. [BECOME A MEMBER]

Robert